The breakout of China-India strategic rivalry in Asia and the Indian Ocean.

• Author: Frankel, Francine R.
• Position: Sino-Indian Relations - Report

Submerged tensions between India and China have pushed to the surface, revealing a deep and wide strategic rivalry over several security-related issues in the Asia-Pacific area. The U.S.-India nuclear deal and regular joint naval exercises informed Beijing's assessment that U.S.-India friendship was aimed at containing China's rise. China's more aggressive claims to the disputed northern border--a new challenge to India's sovereignty over Kashmir--and the entry of Chinese troops and construction workers in the disputed Gilgit-Baltistan region escalated the conflict. India's reassessment of China's intentions led the Indian military to adopt a two-front war doctrine against potential simultaneous attacks by Pakistan and China. China's rivalry with India in the Indian Ocean area is also displacing New Delhi's influence in neighboring countries. As China's growing strength creates uneasiness in the region, India's balancing role is welcome within ASEAN. Its naval presence facilitates comprehensive cooperation with other countries having tense relations with China, most notably Japan. India's efforts to outflank China's encirclement were boosted after Beijing unexpectedly challenged U.S. naval supremacy in the South China Sea and the Pacific. The Obama Administration reasserted the big picture strategic vision of U.S.-India partnership first advanced by the nuclear deal. Rivalry between China and India in the Indian Ocean, now expanded to China and the United States in the Pacific, is solidifying an informal coalition of democracies in the vast Asia-Pacific area.

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The past few years have seen a dangerous rise in mutual suspicion between India and China, propelling bilateral relations toward a deep and wide strategic rivalry. This article examines the security issues that have led to the open breakout of competition between India and China long implicit in their geographical proximity and their great power ambitions in neighboring areas and the Indian Ocean. New Delhi's perspective of Chinese policies that aim at the strategic encirclement of India, as well as Beijing's outlook on India's attempt to limit China's influence in South and Southeast Asia and its power projection into the Indian Ocean, has overridden their formulaic statements of shared interests as partners in strengthening a multipolar world. The new reality of rivalry is evident from the following security issues: (1) the escalation of the Sino-Indian border dispute; (2) the deepening of the strategic alliance between China and Pakistan; (3) China-India rivalry in Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean; and (4) India's "Look East" policy to promote bilateral ties with other countries that have tense relations with China in the region, not least, the United States.

China's long-standing dismissive attitude toward India's capabilities and great power ambitions was shaken when the Bush Administration began protracted negotiations with India in 2005 for entering into a long-term strategic partnership, shortly after their defense ministers signed the bilateral New Framework for the U.S.-India Defense Relationship. (1) The U.S.-India nuclear deal, approved by Washington and New Delhi in 2008, carved out an exception for India from American law prohibiting commerce in civil nuclear energy with a non-signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The last minute push of the Bush Administration to gain an unconditional exemption for nuclear commerce with India from the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) exacerbated China's suspicions that closer U.S.-India friendship was aimed at containing China's rise. Between 2002 and 2010, India and the United States carried out fifty joint military exercises. Since 2008, India has signed arms deals with the United States worth $8.2 billion. (2) China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs pressed India for an explanation, even suggesting that an Asian NATO was in the offing. This exaggerated response coincided with a much more aggressive Chinese claim to the disputed northeast border along the McMahon Line on the Himalayan frontier and the Line of Actual Control (LAC). Bilateral agreements in 1993 and 1996 to demarcate the LAC and diminish the prospect of border clashes similar to those that preceded the 1962 India-China war have yet to be implemented.

Indian officials acknowledged in December 2009 that over a twenty to twenty-five year period, Chinese incursions across India's borders had resulted in the loss of a "substantial" amount of land along the LAC. (3) The precise area claimed by China is unclear without China having offered India official maps of the eastern sector. China's vice minister of foreign affairs and other senior officials defined Beijing's claim in 2001 as 125,000 square kilometers in the eastern sector, and the area of "real conflict" as 95,000 square kilometers south of the McMahon Line. (4) A leading Indian security expert refers to China's occupation of nearly 48,000 square kilometers of Indian territory in the western sector of Aksai Chin in Ladakh, in addition to China's claims of 94,000 square kilometers in the eastern sector, the bulk of which forms India's state of Arunachal Pradesh, shown as part of China on its maps. (5)

A new challenge to India's sovereignty arose in August 2010 in the disputed western sector. Pakistan allowed between 7,000 and 11,000 Chinese troops to enter Pakistan-administered Azad (Free) Kashmir, referred to by India as Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir, or PoK, and the disputed Gilgit-Baltistan region to assist in the construction of a high-speed rail and road link from eastern China to the Chinese-built naval port of Gwadar in Baluchistan, east of the Persian Gulf. (6) Financed mainly by low-cost loans from China's Exim Bank, infrastructure proiects to widen the Karakoram Highway and link roads, extend rail lines, construct bridges and hydropower dams and expand telecommunications coverage employ about 122 Chinese companies. (7)

China's renewed claims and its growing economic presence in PoK elicited sharp criticism from the Indian strategic community and the press, which in turn provoked combative responses from China. A senior Indian national security expert characterized Chinese protests in 2009 as a demarche, warning India not to forget 1962 and China's ability to occupy "southern Tibet." When Prime Minister Manmohan Singh countered China's aggressive stance by visiting Arunachal Pradesh during the state assembly elections in mid-October 2009, the Chinese foreign ministry made known that Beijing was "seriously dissatisfied." India's external affairs minister immediately restated the government of India's fixed position that Arunachal Pradesh is an integral part of India. (8) This point was dramatized by permitting the Dalai Lama to visit the Tawang monastery in Arunachal Pradesh, the birthplace of the sixth Dalai Lama in the 17th century, and as the question builds about selecting a successor to the fourteenth Dalai Lama, a possible place to identify the next incarnation of Tibet's spiritual leader.

China's legitimate rule over Tibet, after it was forced to become a part of China in 1950, continues to be questioned as Beijing increases the migration of Han Chinese to the region, and undermines Tibetan culture through bilingual educational reform that will make Mandarin Chinese the medium of instruction in primary schools by 2015, with Tibetan as a supplementary language. (9) The Dalai Lama, along with the more than 90,000 Tibetan refugees living in India, asserts his religious authority over all Tibetans. Traveling abroad and speaking up for the preservation of Tibetan culture, he keeps alive China's persistent concern that India could play the "Tibet card" to encourage uprisings in favor of Tibet's autonomy like those of 2008 in Lhasa. China's "core interest" lies in preserving full sovereignty over the resource-rich Tibetan plateau, without which "China would be but a rump and India would add a northern zone to its subcontinental power base." (10)

ESCALATION OF THE CONFLICT

The China-India border dispute took on the character of a broader strategic conflict when the People's Daily attacked the stiff Indian position as evidence of "recklessness and arrogance" toward its neighbors, and a foreign policy of "befriend the far and attack the near." (11) In a follow-up article, the People's Daily attributed New Delhi's intransigence to the notion that the United States viewed India as a counterweight to China and was willing to feed India's ambitions with arms sales. It repeated the warning that if India did not practice restraint "an accidental slip or go-off at the border would erode into a war." (12)

The most pronounced recent pressure on New Delhi by Beijing derives from modification of the position it adopted in 1996, when former Chinese president Jiang Zemin signalled that the Kashmir issue should be settled by negotiations between India and Pakistan. India was unprepared for the Chinese government's refusal in 2008 to issue official stamped visas to Indian travelers from both Kashmir and Arunachal Pradesh, instead stapling entry papers to Indian passports. The government of India, which had earlier yielded to Premier Wen Jiabao's insistence in 2007 on a statement using the word "strategic" to describe India-China relations and agreed to regular high-level visits and bilateral defense exercises, informed China in October 2010 that no further defense talks would be held until China respects India's territorial sovereignty over Kashmir and grants official visas to Indian officials. (13)

Informal discussions between China's foreign minister Yang Jiechi and India's external affairs minister S. M. Krishna in Wuhan in mid-November 2010 brought no change in China's policy and sharpened India's position. India, for the first time, drew a direct parallel between...